I have a bit more to say about former MSNBC host Joy Reid and her former colleague Alex Wagner, who recently engaged in an online conversation comparing Independence Day and Juneteenth.
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Reid stated that “nobody black I know is really excited about the 4th of July” and claimed that her black friends basically treat the Fourth as a day off to barbecue. (That seems racist. Is Reid saying that all blacks like ribs and chicken?)
The Heinous One went on to describe Independence Day as “the celebration of slaveholders who freed themselves from having to pay taxes to the Crown for their slave empire.”
Going further, Reid told Wagner that, to many Black Americans, the Fourth of July feels similar to how indigenous people view Thanksgiving. She added that Juneteenth “to me is the real thing” because the United States “really weren’t a democracy until we ended slavery.”
Much as she might like to, Reid can’t speak for all black folks. And we did end slavery, that peculiar and nearly universal institution, and more than 360,000 people gave all in the effort to do so in a war that killed 600,000. Who will pay reparations to those heroes and their families? Upon the conclusion of the American Civil War, more than one hundred other countries still had large-scale forced labor, i.e. slavery.
Is that fact routinely taught in American classrooms and bandied about in American media? Why not? Another fact that isn’t routinely taught is that the United States is not a pure “democracy,” but a representative republic, much to Reid’s and leftists’ chagrin.
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The truth is that America’s birth led to the eventual emancipation of not only blacks in the U.S., but of many peoples around the world. Because the unique and original American experiment hinged on the proclamation of a couple remarkable truths.
One, that government derives any just powers it may have solely from the will of the people … and that limited government of, by, and for the people with equal justice under the rule of law should be the ideal. And, two, that there are certain unalienable rights that we all have, that have been bestowed upon us by our Creator … and upon which governments cannot infringe.
The extent to which a nation’s government acts in concert with those founding American beliefs largely determines how much liberty and happiness its citizens will enjoy.
Far from Joy Reid’s dismal belief, the U.S. was founded on the idea that all men (people) are created equal. And, to paraphrase Lincoln, we are now truly engaged again in a sort of cold Civil War, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure. It is of utmost importance to the future of the world that we, here and now, at the looming 250th birthday of our nation, take increased devotion to the cause of the founders, that we may have a new birth of freedom.
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Let freedom ring.
Image: Luke Harold, via Wikimedia Commons // CCO 1.0 Universal Public Domain